The new investors said that they would soon bring the insurance company into operation after completing the necessary process.

According to Hathway, they jointly bought the company’s shares at an auction held by Nepal Bangladesh Bank and Nepal Credit and Commerce (NCC) Bank which have stakes in NB Insurance.

Hathway’s Managing Director Ambika Prasad Poudel said their company bought 5 percent of the shares while the rest were bought by the promoters of the IME Group.

Of the remaining 54.5 percent of the promoter shares in NB Insurance, the general public owns 20 percent and the rest are held by the NB Group promoted by Jit Bahadur Shrestha and Laxmi Bahadur Shrestha.

Poudel said they were now in the process of receiving the ownership certificates of the shares. He added that they would soon be applying for approval from the Insurance Board (IB) to get NB Insurance operational.

The insurance company landed in a crisis due to large-scale embezzlement of funds by the immediate directors associated with the NB Group, the key promoter of both NB Bank and NB Insurance.

Although NB Bank had attempted to revive the insurance company by injecting capital earlier, it started offloading the company’s shares after the central bank barred banks from holding more than 10 percent of the stock in another company.

NB Bank offloaded its 642,500 promoter shares in NB Insurance. Similarly, the investor group purchased 146,000 promoter shares in the insurance company divested by NCC Bank.

NB Insurance landed in trouble after the IB asked Nepal Rastra Bank in November last year to freeze all the bank accounts of NB Insurance for failing to abide by its directive. The insurer had been charged will making a controversial payment of Rs 59 million in the name of clearing house rent without obtaining the regulator’s consent.

The company has also been accused of investing rampantly without maintaining the necessary level of liquidity as directed by the regulator. The insurer has not submitted its financial reports to the regulator for a long time. In December 2013, the IB had halted all the transactions of NB Insurance for failing to implement the regulator’s directive besides being in poor financial condition.